“It’s a little cool out here today,” he says. “Sit at the front if you want to stay dry.”

We slide along the bench seats toward the captain’s chair. He chokes the engine and starts it up, and the gurgling roar of the motor erupts in a cloud of smoke, chasing off the silence that had hovered along the edge of the lake. It feels like there are things hidden in the wooded shore, living things, that watch us leave before slinking away into the late morning shadows. You move closer to me, and I put my arm around you.

“So who owns the old place?” I have to shout my question so that Tom can hear me.

“I do!” he shouts back without turning around.

“You?” I ask, surprised.

“Shirley and I decided to buy it from the rest of my family about twenty years ago. We never used it though. We wanted to keep it out of the wrong hands.”

“The wrong hands?”

He shrugs. “It’s a beautiful location. We were worried someone might try to develop it, or tear down the cabin and replace it with something modern. It seems unlikely now, with the direction the town is going.”

I reach up with one hand, clap him hard on the shoulder. “Thank you,” I shout into the wind.

As we ease out into the deep, I close my eyes. All I have is the sound of the motor and the boat slapping the water, the scent of the lake and the cold air, the feel of the wind blowing over us, misty and fresh. There is a particular feeling of the sun on my face that takes me back to those days just before your grandmother left us.

Sinking

The heat leaked in around the doors and windows, soaked in through the glass. Mary had been up with Johnny through the night, so early the next morning, she woke me up.

“Can you take over?” She yawned, handing me that little bundle. “I can’t keep my eyes open.”

He floated down into my arms, not yet a week old, fragile, so light it felt like his bones must be hollow, like a bird’s. I got out of one side of the bed while Mary walked around and collapsed into the other side. We were so young. So young. We were kids, barely eighteen. How were we supposed to know? How were we supposed to see clearly?

Mary fell asleep before I even left the room. I carried John out into the living room of the cabin. I heard someone else waking up, a door closing gently, a toilet flushing, a sink running. I lay down on the sofa with John on my bare chest—he was asleep, sucking on his bottom lip, his eyes flickering with dreams.

It was still early on a Saturday morning, which usually meant we slept as late as we could. But Shirley was rubbing her eyes and sitting on the rocking chair, pulling her feet up underneath her as she normally did.